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Caramel Ice Cream
Melt ½ cup of granulated sugar in frying pan, and when brown add ½ cup of boiling water, and let simmer 10 minutes.
Strain, add quart cream, add another 1/2 cup sugar, flavor with vanilla and freeze.
A cooked-sugar (Philadelphia-style) ice cream with no eggs, so the whole thing rests on how far you take the caramel. Everything else is assembly.
- The ambiguous first measurement"1/½ cup of granulated sugar" is a typesetting error and cannot be resolved with certainty; it is either 1/2 cup or 1 1/2 cups. Half a cup, matching the second addition, is the safer reading; 1 1/2 cups of dry caramel against a quart of cream would give a far more assertive, possibly bitter result.
- Dry caramel, no stirringMelting sugar alone in a skillet is a dry caramel. Use a heavy pan over medium heat, swirl rather than stir, and pull it off at a deep amber. Past that it turns acrid, and the bitterness will carry straight through the cream.
- Adding the boiling waterDeep-amber dry caramel is extremely hot, in the region of 340F, and the water will erupt on contact. Pour it down the side of the pan at arm's length, off the heat, then return to a simmer to dissolve any set lumps. Boiling water is presumably specified because cold water makes the sugar seize into a hard mass.
- What the ten minutes doesSimmering reduces the mixture to a thin caramel syrup and drives off enough water that it will not dilute the cream. Straining catches any grains that refused to dissolve.
- "Quart cream"In a book of this period this means a rich cream, though period creams were not graded as today's heavy cream is and varied considerably. Four cups of it makes an extremely rich ice cream; half cream and half whole milk is closer to what most people now expect, and churns more easily.
- Chill before churningThe recipe skips this. Combine the caramel syrup, cream, remaining sugar and 1 to 2 teaspoons vanilla, then refrigerate until thoroughly cold — 40F or below — before it goes into the machine. Warm mixtures churn to a coarse, grainy texture. A pinch of salt sharpens the caramel.
- Freezing then and now"Freeze" meant a hand-crank pail packed with crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, cranked 20 to 25 minutes. In a modern machine, churn to soft-serve consistency, then harden in the freezer for at least four hours.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Caramel ice cream belongs to the Philadelphia tradition — cream, sugar and flavoring, no egg custard — which American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century favored for its simplicity, alongside the custard styles equally common in the period. Burnt-sugar flavoring was a standard trick of the period, used to color and flavor everything from cakes to gravies, and "caramel" in older books often means this cooked syrup rather than the chewy candy the word now suggests. Books of the Reliable Recipes type, compiled from contributed household recipes and published cheaply around the turn of the century, give the instruction here as simply "freeze." Commercial ice was widely available in American towns by then, and ice cream had shifted from a luxury requiring an icehouse to a Sunday dessert a family could crank on the back porch.